Brett Adcock: from a tiny Illinois farm town to robots, flying cars, and a real-life Jarvis

That's a billionaire talking. And honestly? That's every parent I know.

Earlier this week I wrote about Hark Pro, the AI that does your errands for you. But Hark is one piece of something much bigger. Brett Adcock is running four companies at once: a $39 billion humanoid robot company, a flying-car company he took public, a weapons-detection company protecting schools, and a $6 billion AI lab. Every one of them is aimed at the same target: give people their time back.

I went through about six hours of Brett across four long-form interviews: Shawn Ryan, Moonshots, Sourcery, and My First Million. Here's the whole story: where he came from, how he built each company, the playbook he keeps running, and the future he's betting everything on.

The quick version

Act 1: A farm kid who wanted to control his destiny

Adcock grew up in a farm town so small it had "no traffic lights, no fast food. It was a dry town." His family had worked the same land for three generations.

His dad gave him and his brother Colby the advice that shaped everything: farming is entrepreneurial, and if you want to control your destiny, run your own business. In Brett's words, the message "beaten into our heads" was that "at some point you need to probably get out of here, get out of farming… and start something of your own."

So he did, early. In high school and college he was selling things online: drop-shipping, electronics, lead gen. "I didn't grow up with money, so the internet was a way to make some money… I loved the ability to go out and create things and control my destiny."

(Colby took the same advice. He now runs Scout, an AI defense company. The brothers live a block apart.)

Even then, Brett knew what he wanted to build. He spent a decade in software "wishing I was working on hardware stuff I could touch with my hands." He wanted atoms.

Act 2: Vettery, broke for five years, then $110 million

After college Brett moved to New York and started Vettery in 2012. The idea came from his own job hunt, which felt like "a boys' club… it wasn't very much a meritocracy." Vettery used algorithms to match tech talent with employers with no recruiters in the middle.

It was brutal for years. From 2012 to 2017 he was "always running out of money." In 2015 the company scraped together a $500,000 convertible note. Brett took out a personal loan, wasn't paying himself a salary in New York City, and was "in the negative."

Then the marketplace launched and "completely took off." At its peak, Vettery handled 20,000–30,000 interview requests a week with no humans involved. Adecco, the world's largest recruiting company, came knocking unsolicited. No banker, no sale process. They paid $110 million.

Brett was about seven years in and "completely dead broke" right up until the wire hit.

Here's a stat he shares from those days: of roughly 50 companies in his NYU incubator class, five years later only two had made more than zero dollars. His was one of them. "If you're around this game for long enough, everybody dies."

Act 3: Archer, a basement full of books and a flying car

After the sale, Brett took about a year to decide what was next. He was torn between two problems: school shootings, which had increased roughly tenfold in a decade, and flying cars. He picked flying cars.

There was one small problem: he knew nothing about building aircraft. So he did what he always does. He filled his basement with "every possible book" on electrification, vertical lift, and winged aircraft. He went to week-long NASA and university courses on rotorcraft and electric propulsion and got "completely obsessed" with an algorithm for sizing electric aircraft.

At one of those courses, at a Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, he met a University of Florida PhD student who introduced him to a professor running a drone lab with 12 PhDs. Brett flew down that weekend, "ended up taking over his lab," and moved his wife and daughter to Gainesville to build aircraft. The company is named after the street the lab was on: Archer Road.

"There was no Venn diagram of overlap" between people who understood electric motors, rotorcraft, and airplanes, he says. "I had to learn it from first principles."

Then came the hard part. Top VCs don't fund deep tech, so Brett put nearly all of his Vettery money into Archer. "I bought a house and the rest of the money went all into it." He faced a choice: raise $100 million privately or go public and raise about a billion. He went public through a SPAC, and during the process he got sued by Boeing and Larry Page's Kitty Hawk after their core engineers moved to Archer. He woke up to it on the front page of The New York Times. Going public was "probably one of the hardest experiences of my life."

He took Archer public within three years of starting it. In 2022 he stepped down as co-CEO to chase something even harder.

Act 4: Figure, giving AI a body

Why humanoids? Brett's answer is simple and kind of beautiful. We built the entire world around our own bodies: doors, stairs, coffee cups, espresso machines. "If we get dropped on Mars today, we're going to build coffee cups that we can hold and stairs and doors." So the machine that can do everything we can do has to be shaped like us. Humanoid robots are "the holy grail of robotics."

The money is staggering, too. "A little under half the world's GDP is human labor." That's $30–40 trillion in wages paid every year.

Back in 2022, nobody believed him. There had never been an AI running a humanoid robot, and the best humanoid in the world was Boston Dynamics' hydraulic Atlas, which "dripped oil everywhere" and ran for about 20 minutes. So Brett self-funded the entire first year. "We got to a million a month of burn in four months." A 40-person team. 100-hour weeks. He funded it with Archer stock as the share price fell from about $10 to $2, and he took a second mortgage on his house.

What happened next:

• Under 12 months to a robot walking on its own, with two days to spare. Brett believes it was the fastest anyone had ever done it.
• 2023: Figure 01 made a cup of coffee in a Keurig using only neural networks, no hand-written code. "Hot damn, this is going to really work."
• 2024: OpenAI co-led Figure's roughly $700 million Series B. A year later, Brett fired them. "Our team internally… were running circles around OpenAI." When OpenAI called to say it was thinking of building its own robotics team, "I was just like, this is over."
• 2025: Figure 02 robots worked 10-hour shifts at BMW's plant every day for six months, helping build X3s. Brett bought the first four robots that did it. One lives in his house.
• 2026: Helix 2 deleted the last 109,000 lines of C++ code. Figure 03 runs entirely on neural nets, cost about 90% less to build than Figure 02, and comes off the BotQ line in California roughly every 90 minutes.

His summary: "We made five to 10 years of progress in three, four years."

And he's blunt about the competition. Most robot videos you see online, he says, are either teleoperated (a human driving it from a back room) or pre-programmed replays. "It'd be the equivalent of… I have a self-driving car company and there was a guy in Tennessee driving it."

Act 5: Cover, the company he couldn't walk away from

Remember the other problem he almost picked in 2018? He never let it go.

Back then, Brett found a research paper from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and called the authors. They'd built a radar system to spot bomb vests from a distance during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When the wars ended, the funding went to zero. They walked him down to the basement, pulled a tarp off a decade-old machine, and pointed it at a mannequin with a gun under its shirt. On the screen, the gun was "crystal clear."

He shelved it for Archer. Then, about two years ago, an investor looked him in the eye and said: "I have kids and you have kids. You have a fiduciary duty to go build this." Brett's daughter was applying to first grade at the time.

So he bought the technology outright from JPL, hired the original team, opened an office in Pasadena, and has self-funded it since. The idea: more than 90% of school shootings are unplanned. A kid brings a gun to school habitually and something sets it off. If you can see the gun, you can stop it. Cover's terahertz radar scans students passively as they walk through the door from 5 to 30 meters away, with no metal detectors and no lines, so the kids don't feel like they're entering a prison.

The early system used parts that cost $50,000–60,000. Cover redesigned them into custom chips that cost about $7. That's how you get it into 130,000 K-12 schools.

He says it's harder than building flying cars. "I actually think it still is."

Act 6: Hark, a Jarvis for everyone

I covered Hark in depth in my Hark Pro breakdown, so here's the short version. While Brett was building some of the most advanced AI on the planet at Figure, the AI on his phone was letting him down. "It's so stupid. It doesn't know me at all… can't even order me a sandwich." It "feels like I'm in an incognito window searching Google."

He waited a year and a half for someone else to fix it. "I look at Apple, I'm just like, what are they doing?" Nobody did, so he started Hark with $100 million of his own money and hired Apple's iPhone Air designer, Abidur Chowdhury. Hark is building new AI models and new devices that will "replace your phone and computer."

The Adcock playbook

Four interviews, five companies, and the same ideas keep coming up. This is the part I'd tape to my monitor.

1. Pick the hard problem on purpose

Hard problems have less competition, attract the best people, and pay off asymmetrically. His math on robots: a humanoid might be three or four times harder to build than a robot dog, but the payoff is "a million X." Hard things usually aren't 100x harder. They're 3x harder with 100x the reward.

2. Be in the right decade

Being early is the same as being wrong. Archer worked because electric motors and batteries had just gotten good enough. Figure worked because deep learning had just started working.

3. Learn it from first principles, fast

He knew nothing about aircraft in 2018. He knew nothing about humanoids in 2022. Both times he bought every book, took every course, found the best people, and closed the gap himself.

4. Own the whole stack

Figure designs its own motors, rotors, stators, sensors, batteries, hands, and software. "Without that, you're left with the mercy of some vendor." The vertical integration is the moat.

5. Bet your own money first

He self-funded Figure's first year, Cover for two years, and Hark's first $100 million. When nobody believes you, your own check is the proof.

6. Hire builders, and test every one of them

He technically assesses every hire himself. His tell: people who've really done the work talk about it like "a scar you carry with you." At Figure, the mechanical engineering team ran 10 case-study interviews a week for six months and didn't hire anyone. And he won't win bidding wars for mercenaries. "You make a really good team of 20 or 30 or 40 people" who care.

7. Work in the bullpen, not the corner office

After Archer's IPO he felt stuck in "two-day quarterly board meetings" and C-suite check-ins. He cut almost everything except product engineering. Panels, trade shows, traditional PR? "None of this matters. It's not real."

8. Cut your life down to two buckets

He used to split his time between work, family, and "other stuff": golf trips, bachelor parties, the old friend in town. About five years ago he cut the third bucket entirely. "Every minute I'm away from one of these two is a minute away from my family or work." He's home by six for dinner and bedtime, then often back at the office until midnight.

9. When it's bad, make a punch list and go day by day

You can't look at Friday. You get to tomorrow. When Sam Parr compared it to running an ultramarathon (pick a landmark 200 yards ahead and promise yourself you can quit when you get there, then pick the next one), Brett said that's exactly how he thinks about it.

10. Set the bar at your own family

At Archer, he wouldn't call the aircraft safe until he'd put his own kids on board. At Figure, the robot is ready for your home when it's ready to run free around his one-year-old and four-year-old.

11. Just start, and don't quit

His advice to young founders on Shawn Ryan was the simplest thing he said all day: "Just go start building." Every step teaches you something you couldn't have learned standing still, "like little stairs I'm climbing over and over." He admits there's no rule book, and the path is lonely. "I've never had somebody for 20 years I could call and just like, what should I do in this situation." But the rule that matters is simple:

And this from a guy who's 39 with billions behind him: "I feel like I'm in the early innings of my career."

The future Brett Adcock is building

Strip away the companies and you get a pretty clear picture of the world he thinks is coming, and soon.

An age of abundance. "This is going to be the largest economy in the world… It'll lead to ubiquitous goods and services for anybody and an age of abundance." When robots and AI can do human work, the cost of almost everything drops. Figure's own master plan describes "a significantly higher standard of living, where people can pursue the lives they want."

A humanoid in every home, like a phone or a car. "In our lifetime… every human will have a humanoid." He's talking about tens of billions of them, eventually leased for something like a car payment. In about two years, he predicts, "all the robots will build all the robots."

Labor becomes optional. "All this physical labor we do today I think will be optional in the future. You might like gardening… you might like mowing the lawn. If you don't want to, all this will be a choice."

Synthetic humans, physical and digital. "Millions, billions, tens of billions of synthetic humans, in the digital world maybe trillions… the greatest increase in productivity we've ever seen." AI, he says, will be "100 times bigger than the internet."

Your own AI operating system. "I want my AI to run a little Brett Adcock operating system and run my life." He calls it a compression algorithm: everything you carry around in your head gets delegated, so you can spend your time on the people and work you love.

Cities that grow upward. "The airspace is three-dimensional and the roads are not." Any trip over 20 minutes moves to the sky. You live farther out and get downtown in under 30 minutes for about the price of an Uber.

Safer schools. Weapons detection that works quietly in the background so kids just walk to class.

And a lot of caution. Figure won't do military work: "A robot will just walk right up your stairs and open your door… you've got to be very careful with it." It won't license its AI to other hardware makers either, because of "a fiduciary duty to civilization to build really safe humanoid robots." He also admits the jobs fear is real. "It's a scary thing… we just want to be very careful about how we position this."

My honest take

I love this story. A farm kid who was dead broke for five years built four of the most ambitious companies on the planet, and he still makes it home for bedtime. That's the part that gets me. He said it best himself: "Young entrepreneur Brett 20 years ago would have been like, no f---ing way you get a shot to go do this stuff."

But I'll be straight with you too:

• His timelines are aggressive. Robots in homes, robots building robots, Archer certification — Brett is famously optimistic, and plenty of his dates will slip. He even admitted his Cover school-pilot prediction for 2026 would probably miss by a quarter.
• The odds are long and he knows it. On Sourcery, he said the odds of any of this working are "super low… and I think that's probably pretty accurate." He calls his day-to-day "a fun house of problems."
• Something will go wrong. He says so himself. Will robots "hurt somebody at some point? I think that's bound to happen" at this scale. His bet is that, like cars and airplanes, the upside wins: "I think we need this… just like we need cars." He's probably right, but that's still a bet.
• The jobs question isn't solved. "Labor becomes optional" sounds great. Getting from here to there without hurting a lot of people is a real problem, and nobody has a full answer yet, him included.

None of that changes the direction. If even half of this lands, the next decade looks very different than the last one.

What this means for business owners

Two things.

1. Your next customer might be an AI. Between Hark's agents and robots that can shop, book, and order on our behalf, a growing share of buying decisions will run through machines. If your business isn't clear, structured, and visible to AI, it won't get picked. That's the whole reason we treat AEO and GEO as core services.
2. Steal the playbook. You don't need a $39 billion robot company to use it. Pick the hard problem in your market. Own the parts of your business that matter most. Cut your life down to what you actually care about. And when it gets ugly, write the punch list and get to tomorrow.

Hear it from Brett: every podcast in this piece

• The Shawn Ryan Show #292: Brett Adcock — Shawn Ryan Meets a Humanoid Robot (Mar 30, 2026, ~3 hrs). The full life story, from the farm to Cover. The longest and most personal one.
• Moonshots with Peter Diamandis #229: Humanoid Run on Neural Net, Autonomous Manufacturing, $50T Market (Feb 11, 2026). Recorded at Figure HQ the day Helix 2 launched. The best one for the age-of-abundance vision.
• Sourcery: Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure (Apr 30, 2026, 33 min). The fastest listen. Firing OpenAI, scaling Figure, and how he spends his time.
• My First Million #851: $39B Founder Says His Company Could 100x in 5 Years (Aug 14, 2026). Hark, the talent wars, and how he deals with rock bottom.
• My First Million #597: EXCLUSIVE: $3B Founder Reveals His Next Big Idea (June 17, 2024). The Cover launch.
• My First Million #499: This $3B Founder Is The Next Elon Musk (Sept 26, 2023). Nearly going broke after a nine-figure exit.

FAQ

Sources: The Shawn Ryan Show #292, Moonshots #229, Sourcery, and My First Million #499, #597, and #851 (quotes checked against episode audio for #292, #229, Sourcery, and #851) · Figure Master Plan · Wikipedia · Figure AI on Wikipedia · Vertical Mag · Intel Capital